All is well at Make My Trip (makemytrip.com)?

If we look at the financial results or user acquisition of MMT then from the surface it looks like the company is doing extremely well. But is there an undercurrent against the company? Did they fail to judge the pulse of the customers recently? There is no indication in results yet but if we dive deep then we can see some alarming trends.

User Demographics

Though MMT was started in US but looks like they could not penetrate much in the market and only 2.5% visitors come from US. Looks like MMT service is popular among 25-34 year old male customers as they constitute the biggest customer base of the company. It is expected that that group tends to travel more by air and buy holiday packages. But absence of female buyers from the same age group and buyers from the group 35-44 is striking.

User satisfaction and word of mouth

There was time when MMT used to draw favourable review from the users. But looks like the honeymoon period is over and the service has deteriorated. Only 29% of the users have recommended MMT in a forum at mouthshut.com and average rating in most of the parameters is 2 out of 5. The data for last one year is even more shattering as only 6% of the users recommended MMT and ratings came down to the lowest point of 1 out of 5. Though other online travel agents (OTA) also got similar ratings but some OTAs like ezeego1 managed to draw better reviews and recommendations.

Online traffic at Make My Trip

MMT is equally positioned with competitors like Yatra.com as far as searching of the site in internet is concern however interesting point to note is that MMT is popular in western and southern cities like Mumbai, Pune or Bangalore. However it cannot be said for cities like Delhi, Kolkata where competitors are ahead of MMT. In the traffic ranking the company is on par with top competitors, thanks to new rail and bus service introduced by the company, but page views in the site is lesser than the competitors. One alarming statistics is that around 40% of the visitors at MMT bounce back from the first page and does not explore the website at all. Competitors are positioned far better at around 20% of the users bouncing back. Similarly users spend lesser time in average at MMT than competitors. Average time at MMT is 4 minute but at competitors site it is around 6 minute. Around 20% of the visit at MMT comes from search engine as compare to 15% of the visit at competitors’ website. It is an indication that MMT is getting lesser number of repeat buyers than its competitors.

The statistics discussed above is not encouraging for MMT and the company should proactively work to seek solutions otherwise it can bring bigger threat to the company in future.

Source: mouthshut.com, Google Trend, Alexa